Ok, so last week I got my Asus G73SW-XT1. First off, after seeing how much bloatware there was on it, I reinstalled Windows 7 64-bit, clean install. Started installing my steam games and upgrading drivers, so on and so forth.
That evening I was watching some videos on it using WMP and it froze up, sound started looping and I couldn't do anything, I let it sit for 20-30 seconds and then it recovered. No error message, nothing in the Event Viewer. So the next day I reinstalled the drivers from Asus's website instead of the newest NVidia ones. Still had the same problem. Turned the video card power option to maximum performance instead of Adaptive and that also did not solve it.
So, after a week of trying to figure out what is wrong with this thing, it stopped, I was playing Titan Quest and before when it would do it every 15 minutes or so, I now played for 5 hours without any issues. Loaded up Bad Company 2 and 5 minutes in it locked up again.
Ive installed HWmonitor to monitor the temp in games and it never goes above 70C. The other thing Ive noticed that is odd is that when it happens, instead of just stopping the video card and restarting it like it would if the video card driver stopped responding, is that I think explorer restarts itself. The reason I think this is because it drops all my network connections when it happens, and I don't remember noticing that happening when the card stops responding.
Im kinda feeling that the video card is bad, but thats purely a guess on my part.
I sent an email to asus about 5 days ago and still haven't recieved a response and the place I bought it from only accepts returns if its unopened, after its opened its the manufacturers problem. And Im in a bit of a hurry because I deploy to Afghanistan soon so Im really hoping that I can resolve this on my own. Any help is much appreciated.
Also, I watched a video and getting to the RAM under the keyboard, is it really as big of a nightmare as it looks like in this video?
